With health and fitness increasingly being emphasized there is an ever-increasing number and variety of machines on the market. Many of these machines simulate various types of exercise with the intention of giving the user the advantage of the exercise in the comfortable confines of his own home. These machines include ski simulating machines, step climbing machines and treadmills to allow jogging in place. The ski simulating machines have track mounted skis that reciprocate and hand operated cables to simulate arm and shoulder movements. The stairstep machine simulates stair climbing allowing the step to descend rather than for the climber to rise. This eliminates the need for stairs and allows "in-place" stair climbing excerise in a low-ceilinged room.
There are machines which simulate in one form or another most if not all of the popular playground fitness program exercises. One such popular exercise is the hand-walking exercise performed on horizontal overhead ladders, commonly called "monkey bars" found on playgrounds and also used in military training exercises. The primary object of this exerciser is to promote total upper body fitness and coordination. The user grasps the first rung of the horizontal ladder and "walks" hand over hand from one end of the other while elevated above a surface or the ground. It is an object of the present invention to provide a compact, stationary exercise machine that simulates the exercise performed on the horizontal ladder or "monkey bars" without requiring the forward movement of the user. Thus the advantage of a device which usually requires a long space to accommodate it can be had in only a few feet.
Still another object of the present invention is to provide an excerise machine that stimulates a horizontal ladder exercise device with a reel having a plurality of equally spaced rungs which are radially displaced by tracks which engage rollers on the end of each rung.